Two perspectives

1In the opening paper of this colloquium John Davies reviews a number of published accounts of coins from excavations in Greece and asks how much of this material has value for scholars whose areas of interest lay outside of the field of numismatics. His answer is that nearly all of it has potential value, so long as it is not treated as an end in itself but is recognized to be part of a larger whole and related to human activity in some identifiable way or another

2This would seem to be not altogether different from the question asked in the title of F. de Callataÿ’s essay, “De quoi les monnaies grecques trouvées en fouille sont-elles le reflet ?” But by this, F. de Callataÿ is referring more narrowly to specialist, numismatic concerns: How do excavation coins differ from coins recovered from hoards? What do they have to tell us about the history specifically of money? And even if his survey of the characteristics of excavation coins provides few surprises (their being almost entirely of bronze; their limitations in dating associated contextual material, etc.), the wealth of supporting bibliography and statistical data add unprecedented authority to his account.

3Far from being antithetical, these two perspectives rather represent two complementary layers of analysis, the primary numismatic assessment and the subsequent and usually more selective analysis of discerning larger relevancies whether for economic history or political history or both. Good examples of such combined approaches at this colloquium are to be found in the paper on bronze coinage and the political history of Olynthos and Stageira by S. Psoma and C. Gatzolis and in the mass studies of coin finds in the Greek East by F. Duyrat and P. Iossif that have led to their identifying groups of coins that were originally deployed in the pay of military garrisons at Levantine and Seleucid sites.

Sites

4For his pioneering earlier paper of 2006 comparing the coin profiles of excavated Greek sites, de Callataÿ assembled an inventory of thirty-seven sites¹. I have not attempted to find out how much this number has increased since then, but it is growing at a good clip and now would include the appearance of three full-scale monographs, respectively on the coins excavated at Nemea, at Abdera, and at the two sites (one original, the other Hellenistic) of Maroneia². Among the site-specific papers presented at the present conference seven are of sites that will soon be joining the inventory. In this connection, it is worth pointing out that since four of them – Pella, Aegae, Amphipolis, and Stageira – are sites that were, like Abdera and Maroneia, excavated by Greek archaeologists, they represent an especially welcome trend; for until very recently nearly all reported numismatic finds from excavations in Greece had come from excavations run by the foreign schools.

5What do we learn from the site papers? That at Pella stratigraphical digging has been decisive in settling old problems of Macedonian numismatic chronologies. That at Thasos, one of the most unappreciated aspects of coins from long-term excavations, namely the sheer, vast harvest of specimens available for study, has enabled O. Picard to reconstruct an extraordinarily intricate system of dies and administrative details in a long bronze series. That at Argos we are confronted with an important Peloponnesian city whose own bronze coins were greatly outnumbered by coins minted elsewhere. That at Pergamon the accepted bronze chronologies are in need of fundamental revision. That even when available site records are limited to a mere list of identified coins, such lists almost always have something essential to tell or confirm, as, for example, in the replicated patterns of regal and then civic issues at the separate Macedonian centers of Aegae, Pella, and Amphipolis, or in the compelling historical narrative put together from the coin lists of Olynthus and Stageira. No new numismatic methodology here: only the batches of identified coins and a solid knowledge of the complex historical sources of the fourth-century Chalkidike to go with them.

6To these terrestial sites the colloquium adds archaeological sites excavated underwater, both the entire submerged harbor-city of Herakleion-Thonis off the Nile Delta, and the more than two dozen micro-sites of sunken ships. While the coin harvest from Herakleion-Thonis is remarkable because of its rich historical data, A. Meadows reports that the problems it presents for numismatic analysis differ hardly at all from those of conventional excavations on land. And perhaps it not much different for groups of coins recovered from the shipwrecks reviewed by P. Tselekas. Apart from providing clues for the itineraries of the ships on which they were carried, they have in general close analogies with emergency burials of hoards on land.

Innovations

7If the majority of the colloquium papers deal with monnaies de fouilles in familiar ways, the contributions of Duyrat and Iossif mark a dramatic departure by introducing a quantified regional approach that seeks to establish broad statistical conclusions from a massive compilation of coin data from a multiplicity of sites. Duyrat’s compilation extends to fifty-eight excavated Levantine sites, Iossif’s to the Seleucid material at eighty sites with a total of over eight thousand bronze coins that supplement his earlier database of over twelve thousand Seleucid silver and bronze coins from published hoards.

8At the end of his essay, F. de Callataÿ notes another prospect that remains to be explored in the study of site coins by Greek numimatists, namely the highly sophisticated interrogations by specialists in finds of Roman Imperial coins, especially in the UK, regarding such issues as accidental loss vs. intentional discarding, longevity of use, and correlations (or not) of coin abundance with economic prosperity. The behavior of Roman coinage is so much better understood. And yet, as the paper of K. Butcher reminds us, when one reaches late 3^rd c. AD, with its several debased coinages, inflationary prices, and repeated unsuccessful attempts at coinage reform, the complexity can be almost too daunting for expert Romanists.

9Papers of a purely methodological nature also advance new possibilities in utilizing the full potential of mapping spatial representation of coin finds and assemblages, in applying the SIG digital system in site recording, and in encouraging standardization in the reporting of excavation coins. An account of the Israel Archaeological Authority’s system of treating and storing for immediate retrieval all coins from excavations, hoards, and confiscations in Israel presents a standard of state numismatic stewardship that will probably never be surpassed.

Achievement

10I doubt whether many of us at this colloquium had realized how much involvement with excavation coins has expanded since the international conference on numismatics and Greek archaeology in honor of M. Oeconomidou was held in Athens two decades ago. Admittedly, the focus of that conference was a good deal broader, but even so, the circumstance that only four of the papers dealt with monnaies de fouilles, and these from only three sites, gave the impression that this was an area of limited interest except for a very narrow circle of participants. As is obvious from the great range, variety, and quality of papers presented at this 2014 colloquium, there is no chance that anyone could entertain this impression any longer.